Effortless Mindfulness for Addiction Recovery: One Glimpse at a Time
2020-04-05 10:00 - 11:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | BRN Academy
The Effortless Mindfulness approach to addiction draws on Buddhist meditation from Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism. Effortless Mindfulness is a direct approach that considered an advanced, yet simple way to access our true nature and treat suffering at its root. The 2 main premises are: craving is caused by living from our small separate sense of self and there is an already installed awakened consciousness that we can learn to shift into and live from.

The main practice is small glimpses many times a day, rather than long periods of meditation. Rather than focusing and concentrating to calm our minds we begin by opening awareness to a spacious and pervasive subtle level of awareness based knowing. At this time of challenge we will learn simple effortless mindfulness practices as a way to shift out of our addictive mind and into our heart mind.

The Way of Effortless Mindfulness

Loch Kelly, M.Div., LCSW is author of the award-winning book, The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. He is a licensed psychotherapist and recognized leader in the field of meditation and awakening. He is the founder of the non-profit, Open-Hearted Awareness Institute and has worked in community mental health, established homeless shelters and counseled family members of 9/11. Loch graduated from Columbia University and received a fellowship to study in Sri Lanka and India. Loch collaborates with neuroscientists at Yale, UPenn and NYU in the study of how awareness training can enhance compassion and wellbeing. Loch is dedicated to reducing suffering and supporting people to live from open-hearted awareness. Loch is known for his warm sense of humor, and his trust that awakening is the next natural stage of development. He teaches the advanced, yet simple, nondual pointers and direct methods of effortless mindfulness, informed by psychology and social justice. Loch lives in New York City with his wife Paige and their cat Duffy. Info at www.lochkelly.org

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Grounding in Uncertainty
2020-05-03 10:00 - 11:00
“Nothing in the whole universe is comparable to the mind or can take its place. Everything is mind-made.” _Ayya Kheme
I will guide our meditation on the cultivation of kindness and establishing your place of refuge during meditation so that you may begin to train the mind in stillness and peace. Now more than ever, the medicine of the Buddhadharma can help heal our mind-hearts and body by establishing a practice of the essentials in concentration and mindfulness.

Carol Cano, M.A. began her practice over 30 years ago at Wat Kow Tahm in Thailand and has actively engaged in building communities and teaching Dharma internationally. She has completed a myriad of training programs at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and is currently participating in their Retreat Teacher Training. Carol is a core teacher and was a former board member of East Bay Meditation Center. Carol co-founded Philippine Insight Meditation Community in Philippines. Her unique teachings are deeply grounded in Basque, Native American and Buddhist influences that braid the Dharma along indigenous wisdom and Earth-based practices. Carol reminds us to keep grounded in our hearts as we uphold spiritual ideals and encourages us to remain balanced within the demands of modern life. To find out more about Carol, please visit www.carolcano.com.

Meditation | Practice for Challenging Times
2020-06-07 10:00 - 11:00
We will offer a meditation and an opportunity to be together in Sangha, with an emphasis on sustaining practice in these challenging times. Please join us this Sunday, June 7th, led by Robin Smith.

Reflection on Recovery
2020-07-05 10:00 - 11:00
Having just passed the milestone of 35 years sober, exactly half his life, Kevin looks back on his own path and the lessons he has learned as a clean and sober Buddhist.

Kevin Griffin is a Buddhist teacher and author in the Theravada tradition. He is a co-founder of the Buddhist Recovery Network and teaches internationally across Buddhist traditions. He has been a Buddhist practitioner and in recovery for over three decades. His teacher training was at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California, where he still teaches his flagship Dharma and Recovery class. Besides teaching at Buddhist and other spiritual centers, Kevin works with treatment centers and has consulted with leading addiction researchers.

Emotional Sobriety: Comfortable in Your Own Skin
2020-08-02 10:00 - 11:00
Facebook Event Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1400167713509983/

Gary Sanders lives in Portland, OR. He is originally from the Los Angeles area, where he was the founder of SCV Mindfulness and led up to three weekly meditation groups for over 5 years. He was empowered to lead Buddhist meditation and dharma groups at Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. He helped, from the ground level, to found Refuge Recovery, a Buddhist based recovery program for all addictions, which has now spread worldwide. After moving to Portland, Gary was asked to join the teaching staff at Portland Insight Meditation Community. Gary travels frequently and teaches daylongs and workshops all over North America and now endorses the Recovery Dharma program.

Embodying Emotions with Somatic Meditation
2020-09-06 10:00 - 11:00

Liberation Now: From the Progressive Path to Direct Experience
2020-10-04 10:00 - 11:00
In a progressive path approach to practice, we sometimes fall for the idea that liberation is in the future.

We are conditioned to believe that we must end thinking, master practices, meditate for years, and purify our minds. Without realizing it, our beliefs maintain the conditioning that stands in the way of our direct realization.

Rather than turning the attention outward to various objects of practice–mantras, counting the breath, focusing on sound–what changes when we cultivate our effortless capacity to rest the attention in Awareness?

What changes as we practice inquiry into the nature of consciousness?

And how might this approach to practice support our recognition of what’s inherent rather than feed our conditioned tendency to strive?

Meditating during Uncertain Times
2020-11-01 10:00 - 11:00
With the American election coming up, and the spike in COVID cases around the world, it is inevitable that many people may be experiencing PTSD, panic attacks, worry and concern. Many people ask how can meditation help when all you are doing is sitting on the cushion? Don’t we have to get up, go outside and act? Yes we do. What we do off the cushions we bring onto the meditation cushion, and what we do on the meditation cushion we take back into the world. So come and join the President of BRN and explore meditation through a trauma informed lens, and surrender to some healing.
Award-winning author of 8 books, Valerie (Vimalasara) Mason-John is the co-founder of Mindfulness-Based Addiction Recovery MBAR, a secular recovery 8-week program, and the co-author and co-founder of Eight Step Recovery Using The Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction. She was the co-founder of Healing and Insight a teaching faculty embracing Buddhist Recovery in all its guises. She is now responsible for programming Buddhist Recovery Retreats at the Menla Retreat Centre in Upstate New York. Chair of Vancouver Buddhist Centre, she is a senior member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, and tours internationally as a public speaker and trainer in the field of addictions and emotional trauma.Website: www.valeriemason-john.com

Moving into Spaciousness
2020-12-06 10:00 - 11:00
In this talk Mary will talk about identifying those constricted and frightened parts of ourselves that we may not even be aware of. When we’re caught in any type of addictive behavior, we’re also often trapped in habits of mind that are driven by fear and an inability to be with reality. When we hold on to our beliefs of the way things are supposed to be, or fight off the way things are, we’re often tense and cling tightly to our ideas. This practice offers us a way to recognize what this constriction feels like in our bodies and how to let go and make more space. As we release the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”, we can breathe more easily and allow ourselves to be more intimate with our experience. We learn to trust the what’s actually happening instead of what we think might happen. This moves us into the calm and ease that spaciousness allows.

Eight Step Recovery
2021-01-03 10:00 - 11:00
This months teaching will take the form of an Eight Step Recovery meeting

Watch Your Tone: Awareness of Feeling Tones
2021-02-07 10:00 - 11:00
With any experience, there is a felt sense that arises within us before the onslaught of stories and emotions. It often happens so quickly that we are unaware of it. These feeling tones set in motion the habitual reactions of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that we get caught up in.

The Buddha taught us the cause of our suffering in the Second Noble Truth, mainly craving for things to be different than they are. Bringing awareness, our mindfulness, to the subtleties in feeling tones of experiences allows the space for us to see clearly how this plays out, and we then can expand our capacity to respond to experience as it is, rather than react.

Showing Up for Life As It Is
2021-03-07 10:00 - 11:00
So much of our lives can be driven by unconscious reactivity: the endless struggle to avoid painful or negative feelings. With mindfulness meditation, we can develop the skill of patience and presence, so that we can experience calm and contentment even in the midst of all of the challenges of our lives.

Relax the Body, Relax the Mind
2021-04-04 10:00 - 11:00
Our bodies hold so much that we’re not aware of. Our shoulders are tight, our jaws are clenched. This tenseness is often a reaction to cravings, aversions, and other habits of mind that we’re also unaware of. In this meditation and talk, Mary will invite us to relax the body and mind which allows us to be with our thoughts and feelings as they arise and develop the ability to respond with clarity and compassion. This practice is helpful in dealing both with addiction and with moving through our day to day lives.

Changing Poison into Medicine
2021-05-02 10:00 - 11:00
Myokei Caine-Barrett currently holds the position of Bishop of the Nichiren Shu Buddhist Order of North America. She is the first woman and the first American to hold this position. She is also the first American woman and first person of African American-Japanese descent to be fully ordained, having completed this process in 2007 with Archbishop Nissho Uchino in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. She is the guiding teacher and resident priest at Myoken-ji Temple in Houston, Texas.

Myokei Shonin continues to volunteer with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as clergy to two prison Sanghas for the past 16 years in keeping with the Lotus Sutra teaching of full equality of all beings. Her writings have been published in a variety of Buddhist magazines [Tricycle, Lion’s Roar] and newspapers [Nichiren Shu News] and is featured in “The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women.” She is currently developing curriculum for (1) the Nichiren Shu tradition and the Lotus Sutra and (2) dealing with the trauma of incarceration and racism.

Knowing I Am On The Dharma Path
2021-06-06 10:00 - 11:00

Cabbages and Condoms
2021-07-04 10:00 - 11:00
Life is naturally difficult and disappointing. All living creatures are programmed to seek security and safety, and as humans, we also seek certainty. As a result, we often live life as unconscious prisoners of fear.

Fear of this world and of a next world, fear of sickness and of death, fear of insecurity and of being defenceless, fear of the unknown and of the unexpected. In short, fear of life itself.

In this month’s Academy talk, I hope to explore some links between fear and craving. I will offer some ideas, particularly using the Heart practices including forgiveness, for how we might meet life on life’s terms to live a compassionate, confident and fearless life.

Outside Issues and All Our Affairs: The Challenge of Integrating Social Activism in Our Spiritual Practice
2021-08-01 10:00 - 11:00

Loving Ourselves Towards Freedom
2021-09-05 10:00 - 11:00

Ven Pannavati Bhikkhuni - October 2021
2021-10-03 10:00 - 11:00

A Taste of Freedom
2021-11-07 10:00 - 11:00
This month in our Buddhist Recovery Workshop series Vimalasara led us in a guided meditation and Dharma talk.

Reclaiming your Own Original Medicine: The Season of Letting-go as Practice of Self-preservation
2021-12-05 10:00 - 11:00
Indigenous societies recognize individuals holding our personal power as original medicine. The shadow of our false self is purified as we strengthen our authentic self through the practice of coming home to our truth and power. The teachings of the Buddha and indigenous wisdom build this foundation of truth, trust and love.

Meeting Life With Joy
2022-01-02 10:00 - 11:00

The Breath of Recovery
2022-02-06 10:00 - 11:00
Mindfulness of breathing is both the most basic meditative tool and an advanced path to enlightenment, as described by the Buddha. Kevin will discuss the range of uses of mindful breathing, from simple stress-reduction to the higher insights and their value on the path of recovery.
Bio:

Kevin Griffin is a Buddhist teacher and author in the Theravada tradition. He is a co-founder of the Buddhist Recovery Network and teaches internationally across Buddhist traditions. He has been a Buddhist practitioner and in recovery for over three decades. His teacher training was at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California, where he still teaches his flagship Dharma and Recovery class. Besides teaching at Buddhist and other spiritual centers, Kevin works with treatment centers and has consulted with leading addiction researchers.His books include:A Burning Desire: Dharma God and the Path of RecoveryOne Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve StepsBuddhism & The Twelve Steps WorkbookRecovering Joy: A Mindful Life After Addiction
Living Kindness: Buddhist Teachings for a Troubled World
His CDs include:Recovery One Breath at a TimeOne Breath, Twelve StepsLaughing Buddha (music)

Website: https://www.kevingriffin.net/

We Were Made for These Times: Lessons for Moving Through Change, Loss and Disruption
2022-03-06 10:00 - 11:00

Looking for the Truth - The 'secret' facts of life hidden in plain view
2022-04-03 10:00 - 11:00
Human beings are not meant to be ‘happy’. We are compelled to keep chasing pleasure and to avoid pain. The Buddha presented a view of our existence as being a fragile process, ever changing, impermanent, inconstant, uncertain, subject to unavoidable pain and completely impersonal.
And, he also offered us insights and tools that encourage and facilitate the liberating possibility of seeing the basic patterns of things as they really are. But, the choice is ours whether we follow his suggestions or not!

Letting in the Joy
2022-05-01 10:00 - 11:00
Our practice and our recovery are often about recognizing our struggles and where we are stuck. Although it’s necessary that we do this, sometimes we miss the joy that is also present in our lives. Joy is one of the Seven Awakening Factors and an important experience on the path to liberation. In this talk Mary will offer suggestions on how to recognize and cultivate joy in your life, even in the midst of difficulties.

The Bravery of Mindfulness Awareness Meditation
2022-06-05 10:00 - 11:00

Seeing ourselves in the face of suffering, loss, trauma, and joy
2022-07-03 10:00 - 11:00

In the Season of Fire
2022-08-07 10:00 - 11:00
The teaching is an introduction of the Fire sermon from the teachings of the Buddha and how it is relating to these current times.

Practicing In Sangha: Diversity & Belonging
2022-09-04 10:00 - 11:00
